This invention generally relates to an improved apparatus and method for the recording of credit card transactions at point of sale, and for facilitating the reporting of such transactions to a central accounting or other processing activity.
Using the automotive service station industry as an example, commonly used practices call for a customer's purchase to be manually recorded by an attendant on a perforated triplicate copy sales ticket interspersed with two carbon leaves. Variable information, such as the monetary amount of sale, are recorded manually on the ticket with pen or pencil, and then imprinted thereon by an imprinting apparatus in a quality susceptible of optical character recognition equipment processing. Constant information, such as dealer name and code, and customer name and credit card account number, are respectively obtained from a fixed plate secured to the imprinting apparatus and from the customer's credit card when the latter is inserted into the imprinting apparatus.
Once the imprinting is completed, the multicopy sales ticket is usually presented to the customer on a clipboard, for authorizing signature. After signature, the attendant separates the perforated triplicate copies. The top, original copy is presented to the customer when his credit card is returned to him. The bottom, second copy is retained by the attendant for station records. The middle, third copy is retained by the attendant for an arbitrary time, such as one business day, and then transmitted with other similarly accumulated copies to a central accounting activity for subsequent billing of the customer's account and crediting of the station's account.
Considerable difficulties are encountered by the central accounting activity in batch processing the accumulated third copies. For example, such copies do not always arrive in chronological sequence, necessitating hand sorting by date of transaction. Individual copies are sometimes lost, resulting in expensive reconcilement efforts. And, most important, the sheer physical bulk and weight in handling of individual transaction copies results in significant handling, postage or other expense.
To overcome those problems, the instant invention concentrates the transmittal document information by providing a single sheet, continuous form transaction log sheet which carries certain significant information for each transaction such as date, amount of sale, credit card number and signature on a single line of the log sheet. The transactions are listed chronologically, and each transaction may be assigned a printed sequential transaction number. Finally, the invention reduces the physical number of transmittal documents that must be accumulated and mailed to and processed by the central accounting activity, thereby reducing probability of loss and handling expense.